Open source geospatial software provides a way develop scalable solutions that avoid licensing costs and that can be adapted for particular requirements with the help of a large developer community. At GeoAlberta 2018, Ebrahim Poorazizi described the advantages of using open source components to develop a web-based solution for converting legal land descriptions to geographical coordinates. Since open source libraries are based on open standards this provides a way to develop solutions that are interoperable, flexible, and easy to integrate with other applications.
The web-based application that Ebrahim developed is Township Canada and it provides a way to browse and find the Canadian legal subdivisions, geographical coordinates, and places on a map. It enables users to lookup legal land descriptions, geographical coordinates, and places, to see the results on a map and to export them into CSV, KML, Shapefile, and GeoJSON to use in other applications.
The open source stack that Ebrahim used comprises PostgreSQL/PostGIS, GeoServer, MapBox GL JS, Map Box Tile Server, and Vuetify. Vuetify is a material design component framework which provides a number of easily adoptable components adhering to Google’s Material Design guidelines. The application is hosted on AWS EC2.
As an example of legal land descriptions, any parcel of land in Alberta can be located by its legal land description which is based on the Alberta Township Survey (ATS) system. The ATS is a grid network dividing the province into equal-sized parcels of land.
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